"What's happened? Tell me everything."
"Alrighty, then ... picture this if you will."
I've had this idea in my head for quite a few years now. In the mid 2000's Honda introduced a CB4 Interceptor concept.
I thought that a CB-1 would make a good starting point. A big plus to a CB-1 where I live is the insurance is about as cheap as you can get, less than $500 a year with my discount. As soon as you go over 500cc, or the bike gets labelled as a "sport bike", the insurance nearly doubles.
I started computer modelling before I even bought a bike and I quickly found out at least one reason this bike never made it into production. With the fairing and tank modeled as close as possible to the concept bike, there was virtually no turning angle before the lead clip on hit the fairing, and/or the trailing clip on hit the tank. I did a lot of refining before I was able to get decent clearance at both the front and the back. My old wrists cannot stand low clip-ons anymore either, so I moved the bars to above the triple clamp height.
This gave me a basic outline to start working from, and the hunt was on for a donor bike.
I would have loved to pic up a nice low mileage bike to start from, but CB-1's are extremely rare here in my part of Canada, and the used prices are pretty high all across Canada. A nice used one with mileage between 30k - 40K kilometers are usually in the $4000 - $5000 range.
I managed to find a really high miler (88,000km) for a decent price.
Many would have been turned off by the mileage but it ran well, and my thinking was that any bike that has reached that kind of mileage and was still running well must have had regular oil changes and probably spent most of it's life on the highway.
I stripped the bike completely down to the frame, pulled the engine, and got to work. On all my previous bike builds I have CAD modelled absolutely everything before I start building anything. This is a effective technique that prevents a lot of build errors and wasted effort, but it take a lot of time, and I wanted to try to get this bike done as quick as I could. There was no way I had the time to measure and reverse engineer the engine and frame to get it into my CAD program, so I started looking around for some free scanning software to try to scan everything. After much frustration with no progress I came across a post of my local fakebook 3D printer group for a guy here in the city that does 3d scanning. I got a hold of him and sent him some pictures of the bike and told him what I wanted done, and his rates were pretty reasonable, so I booked a time to get things scanned. The bike I bought came with an extra frame so I dropped that off at his house for scanning. He then came over to my house to scan the engine.
This all took most of the summer. In the mean time I was selling parts on ebay to raise funds and slowly buying little bits here and there. I was able to put the spending in overdrive in the early fall when I sold the CB400F endurance racer https://www.dotheton.com/index.php?threads/honda-rs1000-cb400f-mini-replica.76284/
"Alrighty, then ... picture this if you will."
I've had this idea in my head for quite a few years now. In the mid 2000's Honda introduced a CB4 Interceptor concept.
I thought that a CB-1 would make a good starting point. A big plus to a CB-1 where I live is the insurance is about as cheap as you can get, less than $500 a year with my discount. As soon as you go over 500cc, or the bike gets labelled as a "sport bike", the insurance nearly doubles.
I started computer modelling before I even bought a bike and I quickly found out at least one reason this bike never made it into production. With the fairing and tank modeled as close as possible to the concept bike, there was virtually no turning angle before the lead clip on hit the fairing, and/or the trailing clip on hit the tank. I did a lot of refining before I was able to get decent clearance at both the front and the back. My old wrists cannot stand low clip-ons anymore either, so I moved the bars to above the triple clamp height.
This gave me a basic outline to start working from, and the hunt was on for a donor bike.
I would have loved to pic up a nice low mileage bike to start from, but CB-1's are extremely rare here in my part of Canada, and the used prices are pretty high all across Canada. A nice used one with mileage between 30k - 40K kilometers are usually in the $4000 - $5000 range.
I managed to find a really high miler (88,000km) for a decent price.
Many would have been turned off by the mileage but it ran well, and my thinking was that any bike that has reached that kind of mileage and was still running well must have had regular oil changes and probably spent most of it's life on the highway.
I stripped the bike completely down to the frame, pulled the engine, and got to work. On all my previous bike builds I have CAD modelled absolutely everything before I start building anything. This is a effective technique that prevents a lot of build errors and wasted effort, but it take a lot of time, and I wanted to try to get this bike done as quick as I could. There was no way I had the time to measure and reverse engineer the engine and frame to get it into my CAD program, so I started looking around for some free scanning software to try to scan everything. After much frustration with no progress I came across a post of my local fakebook 3D printer group for a guy here in the city that does 3d scanning. I got a hold of him and sent him some pictures of the bike and told him what I wanted done, and his rates were pretty reasonable, so I booked a time to get things scanned. The bike I bought came with an extra frame so I dropped that off at his house for scanning. He then came over to my house to scan the engine.
This all took most of the summer. In the mean time I was selling parts on ebay to raise funds and slowly buying little bits here and there. I was able to put the spending in overdrive in the early fall when I sold the CB400F endurance racer https://www.dotheton.com/index.php?threads/honda-rs1000-cb400f-mini-replica.76284/
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